Farmer,Builder, Project Manager, Farm Consultant, Ecological Infrastructure. Top 20 Emerging Leader in Food and Ag
Watershed engineers. What happens when we create the conditions conducive for life we have so often removed those conditions or made it very difficult for life to cycle naturally or how it has for millennium. Through our and extraction, we have created a degenerative system. It's only when we stop that cycle and start working towards cyclical opportunities where we increase the cycling of natural processes that will begin to restore and work towards generative and regenerative process. ReGeneration is about natural life, cycles, and energy transfer. How does that energy transfer grow in a way that benefits life and all. It seems that almost every sector is using the word regeneration or regenerative, and the only guidepost is if one aspect of that products or service has a regenerative aspect. Life in itself is regenerative if we choose it to be. Beavers are watershed engineers, and are key players in the restoration of our ecosystems #Beavers #WatershedRestoration #Regeneration
runs Climate Water Project, water researcher, writer and podcaster, bringing people together in the regenerative water field, climatewaterproject.substack.com, instagram.com/climatewaterproject
There is a stone in stone bridges - called a keystone - which if we removed, causes the whole bridge to collapse. Keystone species are species which when removed from ecosystems cause things to fall apart. Sea otters are a keystone species. When they leave an area, kelp forests get decimated. That’s because the sea otters are no longer keeping in check the population of sea urchins, which will multiply to eat the whole kelp forest. Restoration of the kelp forest can transpire by bringing back sea otters. Beavers are a keystone species that have played an outsize role in the development of the landscapes and ecosystems of North America and Europe. The removal of them from our continents led to the Great Drying ( a term coined by the geomorphologist and beaver researcher Ellen Wohl) that extended from 1600 to 1900. When I connected with Leila Philip, author of Beaverland - How one weird rodent made America, she bubbled with enthusiasm talking about the importance of beavers to our ecosystems. She writes in her book “When the glaciers of the last ice age melted.. the modern ancestors of today’s beavers wet at it, felling trees and building dams throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. In North America, beaver dams, ponds, and waterworks established hydraulic systems that created much of the rich biodiversity of the continent. That was the primordial Beaverland - North America before European colonizatio, when as many as four hundred million beavers filled the continent….. The great boreal forests that sprang up, threaded with beaver made waterways, would have looked something like what I see now- half water-world- streams spreading out through the forest as great fans of water, overspilling banks, then receding in rhythm with the seasons. Unlike the streams and rivers we know today, mostly degraded so that their currents carve channels through the earth, picking up speed and causing more erosion as they cut deeper into the groun, these messy, slower-moving streams and rivers from the time of Beaverland contracted and expanded like tides, they were arteries and veins of water pulsing life into the land” The importance of bringing back keystone species has been increasingly utilized by the ecorestoration and rewilding movements. In our time of multiple water crises, we would do well to integrate beavers into our water strategy for North America and Europe. The beavers help rehydrate the land, and they help mitigate floods. In the Chesapeake Bay beavers build, for free, stormwater management ponds that that would otherwise cost one to two million dollars, ponds that help extract the pollutants out of the water. Beavers also help stop wildfire. Researchers have shown the land is much less affected by wildfires where beavers make dams compared to beaverless areas. For the full essay, podcast and transcript of my interview of Leila Philip see https://lnkd.in/gdQ8Q4gq \
